Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Don’t hide from it. Just say it so I can hear it.”

“I said, ‘Yeah, you killed him, too.’ ”

I emptied my iced tea into the flower bed, watching the frosted white round cubes of ice bounce on the black soil he had turned and worked with a pitchfork. I set the glass on the railing and walked to my Avalon, my eyes fixed on the long green level of the horizon.

I started my car engine and put the transmission in reverse, then saw his face at the window. His eyes were shining.

“You don’t ease up on me sometimes. You push me in a corner so’s I cain’t find the right words. I ain’t got your brains,” he said.

“Don’t ever say that about yourself. You have ten times any gift I do,” I said, and drove down the state road toward town.

I went five miles like that, past church buses loaded with kids and highway cafes that served Sunday dinners to farm families, all of it sweeping past me like one-dimensional images painted on cardboard that had no relation to my life. Then I turned around and floored the Avalon back to Lucas’s. He had pulled a hose from behind the house and was watering down the seed in the front yard, spraying into the wind so that the drift blew back into his face.

“You going to the rodeo this afternoon?” I asked.

“I’m in the band. We open the show,” he replied, gathering his T-shirt in his hand and wiping his face with it, unsure as to whether he should smile or not.

The rodeo and livestock show didn’t begin that afternoon until the sun had crossed the sky and settled in an orange ball behind the shed over the grandstand at the old county fairgrounds, then Lucas’s bluegrass band walked into the center of the arena, squinting up at the thousands who filled the seats, and launched into “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

Temple Carrol and Pete and I walked down the midway through the carnival and food concession stands that had been set up behind the bucking chutes, eating snow cones, watching the buckets on the Ferris wheel dip out of a sky that had turned to brass layered with strips of crimson and purple cloud.

The air smelled of hot dogs broiling in grease, candied apples, deep-fried Indian bread, the dust that lifted in a purple haze off the arena, popcorn cascading out of an electric pot, splayed saddles that reeked of horse sweat, cowboys with pomade in their hair and talcum coated on their palms, and watermelons that a black man hefted dripping and cold from a corrugated water tank and split open on a butcher block with a knife as big as a scimitar.

Then a bunch of 4-H kids on top of a bucking chute hollered down at a cowboy-hatted man in the crowd, their faces lit with smiles and admiration.

“Hey, Wilbur, we got one here can turn on a nickel and give you the change,” a kid said.

“You ain’t got to tell me. One bounce out of the chute and that one don’t live on the ground no more,” Wilbur Pickett replied, and all the boys grinned and spit Copenhagen and looked at each other pridefully in the knowledge that the bucking horse they might draw was esteemed by the man who had ridden Bodacious one second shy of the buzzer.

Wilbur and Kippy Jo walked past the plank tables pooled with watermelon juice and seeds in the eating area that had been set up under a striped awning that ruffled and popped in the breeze. They stopped by the corrugated water tank, and while Wilbur worked three dollars out of his blue jeans to pay the black man for two slices of melon, Kippy Jo cupped her hands lightly on the edge of the tank and tilted her head, her eyes hidden by sunglasses, staring at the crowd on the midway as though faces were detaching themselves from an indistinct black-and-white photograph and floating toward her out of the gloom and the electronic noise of the midway.

I followed her gaze into the crowd and saw Jeff and Earl and Peggy Jean Deitrich by the merry-go-round, the carved and painted horses mounted with children undulating behind them. Chug Rollins came back from the concession stand and joined them, handing each of them a hot dog wrapped in a greasy paper towel.

That’s what I saw. Wilbur told me later what his wife saw.

The sky was white, the sun ringed with fire above an infinite, buff-colored plain, upon which columns of barefoot Negroes in loincloths were yoked by the neck on long poles. They trudged in the heat with no expectation of water or shade, their eyes like glass, their skins painted with dust and sweat, the inside of their mouths as red as paint. Then she realized that they were dead and their journey was not to a place but toward a man in safari dress, his face concealed from her, his head and body bathed in black light. Wherever he went, the Negroes followed, as though his back were the portal to his soul.

“Earl Deitrich,” she said to Wilbur.

“Yeah. I seen him. He’s early for the shithog contest,” Wilbur said.

“No. The spirits of the Africans his ancestor killed are standing behind him. Their skulls were buried in anthills and eaten clean and used to line a flower bed.”

“Let’s go on up in the stands. I don’t need that stuff in my afternoon. Cain’t that fellow just find a grave to fall into?” Wilbur said.

She lowered her hand into the water tank, felt the melted ice slip over her wrist and the coldness climb into her elbow. The water seemed to stir, the corrugated sides ping with metallic stress or a change in temperature. Two muskmelons which had floated and bobbed on the bottom drifted like yellow air bubbles to the surface.

But the water she now looked down upon was green and viscous, and when the melons broke through the surface they were black and rough-edged, abrasive as coconuts, braided with hair that looked like dusty snakes.

“How’d you make them melons come up, lady?” the black vendor said, grinning, looking at his own reflection in her sunglasses.

She walked out on the midway toward Jeff Deitrich.

Jeff lowered his hot dog from his mouth as she approached, then Earl and Peggy Jean and Chug Rollins stopped talking, glancing peculiarly at Jeff, then turning as a group toward Kippy Jo.

“The black men you drowned … They’ll float up from the car. They’ll follow you just like the Africans do your father,” she said.

“I think you got me mixed up with somebody else,” Jeff said, his eyes shifting sideways.